Visual Studio 2026 Finally Reviews Pull Requests.

Version 18.7 brings PR review into the IDE for GitHub and Azure DevOps. The headline is “no more browser.” The line that changes your day is one row lower in the release notes.

For about two years I have created pull requests from inside Visual Studio and then immediately left Visual Studio to do anything with them. Push the branch, click the banner, open the browser, read the diff, drop a comment, alt-tab back to the code I was halfway through, and spend ten seconds remembering where I was. The “create a PR” button shipped in 2024. The other ninety percent of the review workflow stayed in a browser tab.

Read for free

That changed on June 9, when Visual Studio 2026 version 18.7 went stable. You can now review, comment on, and approve pull requests from both GitHub and Azure DevOps without leaving the IDE. Microsoft showed it off in an Insiders build late last year and it has been baking since. Now it is in the stable channel.

Most of the coverage is leading with “you never have to open the browser again.” Fine. True. Not the part I care about.

The line that matters most

You can review a pull request without checking out the branch.

Read that twice if you review other people’s code for a living. The old loop, when you wanted to review locally, went: stash whatever you were working on, fetch, check out the PR branch, build, poke around, switch back to your branch, un-stash. Most of us skipped all of it and read the diff in the browser instead, because the local round trip cost more than it was worth.

In 18.7 you open the PR, the changes load in an embedded review view, and your current branch, your uncommitted edits, and your working state stay exactly where you left them. You inspect someone else’s work without disturbing your own. When you finish, you are already back in your code. Nothing to put away, nothing to restore.

That is the friction this release removes. Not the browser. The context switch underneath it.

What the experience looks like

The PRs live where your Git tooling already is. Open the Git Repository window from the View menu, or go through Git Changes, or the Git menu under GitHub or Azure DevOps and pick View Pull Requests. You get the PRs for the open repo: the ones your team created, the ones assigned to you, the ones you opened, and the ones Copilot opened.

Click into one and the description, the changed files, the commits, the related work items, and the reviewers are all in a single view. You can go commit by commit instead of staring at one giant squashed diff, which is the only sane way to review a branch with real history in it. The diff renders inline or side by side. You leave comments on specific lines, reply in the thread, and resolve conversations, no browser in the loop. When the review holds up, you vote and complete the PR from the IDE.

Switch to a different active PR midway through and your working branch is still untouched. The whole thing is built around not making you pay for looking.

The Copilot part, and one caution

18.7 also lets you add a PR to Copilot Chat, and you can apply a Copilot-suggested fix while you review. Convenient. I have used enough AI tooling this past year to know how this plays out: useful for the boring stuff, tempting for the stuff that needs a human.

So one piece of pushback against my own enthusiasm. Code review is the single workflow where a little friction is healthy. The pause, the second look, the “wait, why is this here,” is the entire point of the exercise. When review goes frictionless and the IDE is also offering to write the fix for you, the path of least resistance becomes approve, apply, merge, next. Use Copilot to draft a comment or flag a smell. Don’t let it do the thinking your name on the approval is supposed to stand for.

Where the browser still wins

This is not a full replacement for the web experience, and Microsoft’s own roadmap says so. They have already confirmed comment filtering and a timeline of PR activity are coming in future releases. Translation: the in-IDE view does not have them yet.

So the web still owns a few things. Branch policies and required-reviewer enforcement live on the server. The full conversation history on a large, contentious PR is easier to follow on the web. Checks and CI status at a glance, cross-repo linked items, and navigating a genuinely huge diff are all more comfortable in GitHub or Azure DevOps proper. And if your team runs Bitbucket or GitLab, this does nothing for you. It is GitHub and Azure DevOps only, including on-prem Azure DevOps Server, though some people are hitting connection quirks with Server 2022 worth checking on Developer Community before you depend on it.

Whether it’s worth turning on

Yes, for two situations. The first is the quick review a teammate pings you about mid-task, where the cost used to live entirely in the context switch and is now close to zero. The second is any review where you wanted to pull the branch and look around but never bothered because of the stash-and-restore tax.

Update to Visual Studio 2026 18.7, open the Git Repository window or the Git menu, and your PRs are there. For governance-heavy reviews with strict policies, or a four-hundred-file monster, I am still opening the browser. For the daily back and forth of reviewing my team’s work, I have had it on since it dropped and have not reached for the browser once.

The browser tab was never the problem. Losing my place was. That is the thing 18.7 quietly fixed.